Jovelle Carty is lying on her hotel bed in Florida, watching cartoons on the television with her cousin, when the phone rings. It's Enid, her grandmother, back in Houston, Texas. She is crying because she's been trying for hours to contact Jovelle's mother, Linda. Jovelle tries too, but with no luck. Then, at six o'clock that evening, Jovelle receives a call from a man who works with her mother. "She's in trouble," he says. Jovelle's heart stops. "I don't know if I can help."
The man on the phone that night back in May, 2001, was Charlie Mathis, a handler working for the Houston branch of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Linda was one of his paid informants. But the 'trouble' Linda had landed in was nothing to do with her work for him. It wasn't until Jovelle got back home that she found out what had happened: Linda had been arrested for the murder of her neighbour, Joana Rodriguez, and accused of kidnapping her baby.
I first heard about the case in 2004, two years after Linda was sentenced to death for the crime. The prosecution painted her as a baby-crazed woman, prepared to kill in order to pass off her neighbour's infant as her own. But I soon found there was more to the story - most of which hadn't fully come out at her trial.
Jovelle told me she used to romanticise the life she thought her mother must be living working as an informant for the DEA. "I felt like she was this amazing person jumping over buildings and never thinking about the danger involved. I thought that only happened in the movies," she said, "so I blew her up into this superhero." The truth was, what Linda Carty was doing was dangerous. In the 1980s, Houston had a drug problem. Jamaican gangs operating throughout the U.S. were considered the most violent segment of the criminal underworld. The gangs referred to themselves as 'posses' after TV Westerns, but these modern-day outlaws, involved in murder, drug trafficking, kidnappings and assaults, were about as far removed from the romantic image of the cowboy as you could get.
The DEA needed someone with a Caribbean background to help infiltrate the gangs, and Charlie asked Linda if she'd join them. "It was interesting work and low-key for me. I had to take on the life of a drug dealer," she said. Her task was to befriend suspected traffickers in order to get information and, occasionally, make test purchases of drugs. It was risky work. Her targets were dangerous people. But Linda would prove to be a good hire for Charlie. He trusted her and Linda would risk her life for him time and again, and she was responsible for putting countless criminals behind bars. Jovelle, meanwhile, had gone from thinking her mum was a superhero to worrying about her constantly. "If she wasn't home, I'd lie awake until I heard the door open downstairs," she told me.
Linda, who denied having anything to do with the murder and kidnap, said she was a target of members of the Houston underworld harbouring a grudge. For me, it's almost irrelevant whether she's telling the truth or not. The fact is, almost nothing of what you've just read about Linda's past, risking her life for the U.S. government, was brought up at her trial. Could Linda's work for the DEA have been effective in mitigation? Probably, but we'll never know, because she was denied that chance. Her defence team failed to call Charlie Mathis to the stand. I spoke to Mathis for one of a couple of stories I wrote on the case for the Guardian newspaper. "I think everybody deserves a proper trial," he told me. "I think the guys hog-tied that woman, they stuffed her into that hatchback, and her lungs couldn't fill with air ... All we know is what the men said. And they [took a plea deal] to avoid the death penalty. Is that fair?"
A juror at Linda's trial told me he'd always been "one of those crank 'em up, it's high noon, hang 'em high type people," but said he was confident in the conviction. Confident despite the plea deal that Linda's co-accused took. Despite the fact Mathis wasn't called to the stand. Despite the fact that Linda's common-law husband wasn't informed of his right not to testify against her. Despite the fact that nobody from her native St. Kitts was called to tell the jury about her good character. Despite the fact that the prosecution held aloft a pair of bandage scissors and claimed Linda was going to use them cut the baby from Joana Rodriguez's womb - bandage scissors that are incapable of cutting through flesh.
But the reason we should care about Linda's story is nothing to do with her guilt or innocence. It's because the U.S. legal system failed to ensure she had a fair trial. And if you believe in the death penalty, fairness should not be desirable, it should be mandatory.
Two hundred and thirty seven executions have been carried out in Texas on presidential hopeful and current state governor Rick Perry's watch. It begs the question: will Linda ever get the justice she deserves?
Alex Hannaford is a British feature writer living in Texas (www.alexhannaford.com)
